Of Dairy Queen, Character and the Twenty Dollar Bill

Nineteen-year old Joey Prusak didn’t know his character would be tested when he started his shift at the Dairy Queen in Hopkins, Minnesota recently. But it was. And his kindness went viral.

When a customer who is visually impaired was putting his change back in his pocket after making his order, Prusak saw that the man dropped a twenty dollar bill on the floor without noticing it. Shocked, the young employee watched as a woman behind the man in line picked up the bill. But, rather than return it to the man, the woman stuffed it in her purse.

What would you have done?

Joey Prusak challenged the woman to return the bill to the man. She refused.

The New York Daily News fills in the story:

“She looked at me and said, ‘That’s my money,'” Prusak said.

The moral Minnesotan explained he’d seen everything, but she only argued louder.

“I finally told her, ‘Ma’am, I’m going to ask you one more time to return the money or leave the store,'” he said.

Unbelievably, she still refused.

“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave, because I’m not going to serve someone as disrespectful as you,” Prusak said.

She left, but not before unleashing a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse on the teen.

“She had some choice words to say the least,” he said.

Prusak watched her go, and then went to sit down with the blind man. He explained everything and handed him $20 from his own pocket.

The young man didn’t know he was being watched. But a customer who had seen Prusak’s character in action wrote an email (shown below) to the DQ’s owner and the story went national. The email writer said “I was in shock by the generosity that your employee had. Taking his own money out of his own wallet to give to the customer because some other lady decided to steal something that wasn’t hers. I would proudly like to say that Joey has forever sealed my fate as a lifelong customer of the Mainstreet Dairy Queen.”